[Veritas Forum at Yale] GOD in the COSMOS - Dr. Jennifer Wiseman, astronomer with NASA Goddard Space Flight Center provides us with a journey through the cosmos

Chief of the Laboratory for Exoplanets and Stellar Astrophysics at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center

Dr. Jennifer Wiseman has studied star-forming regions of our galaxy
using radio, optical, and infrared telescopes, and currently serves as Chief of the Laboratory for Exoplanets and Stellar Astrophysics at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. She studied physics at MIT for her bachelors degree, discovering comet Wiseman-Skiff in 1987. She then earned a Ph.D. in astronomy at Harvard University
in 1995. She accomplished subsequent research as a Jansky Fellow at the
National Radio Astronomy Observatory and as a Hubble Fellow at the Johns Hopkins University.
In addition to research, Dr. Wiseman is also interested in public
science policy. She was selected as the 2001-2002 Congressional Science
Fellow of the American Physical Society, and served on the staff of the
Science Committee of the U.S. House of Representatives. She then served
from 2003-2006 as the Program Scientist for the Hubble Space Telescope
at NASA Headquarters in Washington, DC. Dr. Wiseman has also authored
several essays addressing the relationship of astronomy and Christian
faith. She grew up on an Arkansas farm, where she enjoyed late night
star-gazing walks with her parents and pets.

Gazing
at the Universe from Different Perspectives:

MAGNITUDE

·Earth is 150,000,000 kilometers from the sun. Pluto is 6 billion km from the sun

·1 light year: the distance light travels in
a year is about 10,000,000,000,000
km away

·We see galaxies at distances of several billion
light years away, looking as they did that long ago when the light left the
galaxy.

There are about 100 billion galaxies, andat least 100 billion stars in each one, meaning there are roughly 10,000 billion billion (10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000) stars in the universe! ...

[image at 20:05] The green circles represent galaxies identified
as the most distant, the most what we called “red-shifted”.Edwin Hubble found out decades ago that the universe is expanding, which means
that as space expands, the galaxies are caught up in that expansion of space, and
the most distant of galaxies from us appeared to be moving away from us faster than
the ones that are closer to us because of this universal expansion of
space. ...

Why do we care? Well, we live on
carbon and oxygen; we depend on star factories to make them. Very, very interesting process.

[image 24:35] We can see progression throughout the history
of the universe. So this is a map, funny
looking map, but it’s a map of the background radiation that we see in every
direction in the sky. So, this is the
full sky, looking at every direction but projected onto a plain. What we’re seeing is the leftover radiation
that was predicted would be there if our universe had a very energetic and
precise beginning point in time.

Now, we heard so much all of our lives about the
Big Bang, so
this may not seem like a big deal. But a
few decades ago, this was a big debate whether our universe actually had a
beginning or in a steady state forever. ...

ACTIVITY[28:48]

The universe is a very active
place. Here are two galaxies. I told you that galaxies are carried along the expansion of
space, and so for the most part they are moving away from each other.

Butthere are times when
galaxies are so close to each other that their gravitational attraction for
each other can overcome that otherwise tendency to move apart from each other. ...

MYSTERY[35:30]

There’s a lot of things we don’t
quite understand yet. One of them is the
whole idea of MATTER THAT WE CANNOT SEE.
It turns out that when you look carefully at the rotation of stars in
the galaxies, you can tell that there’s a lot of matter that we don’t see that
must be there.

Stars are basically orbiting the center of mass of galaxies.

It’s a simple calculation for
those of you who have taken physics or astronomy courses, to calculate the
velocity of something in orbit by just knowing the mass of the object and the
mass within its orbit. It turns out that
there must be much more mass in galaxies
than is evident through our observations to account for the rotation speed of
the material in the galaxies. We called
this DARK MATTER because we don’t know what it is. And it’s not quite clear even if we could
guess things that we might be able to see, like planets or small things, there’s
still not enough of it to account for what it is.

So, we don’t know what it is. But interestingly enough, we can still can make maps of it, even
though it’s dark and we can’t see it. How
is that? Well,you can see its effects on things. This is a very clear picture [36:50] taken of a cluster
of galaxies. Imagine how much mass. If you have a cluster with that much mass, it
can act as something called a “gravitational lens”. Einstein and others predicted that something with great mass could even
bend light that comes near by it.

So, we now know that clusters of galaxies are massive enough to
bend light coming from background galaxies, enough that we can detect that “gravitational
lensing” as we call it. And
we see distorted shapes of galaxies in the background being distorted as they
come near these clusters.

[same image at 37:40] Well, this funny looking picture is a
combination of just a regular picture of cluster of galaxies and the blue
shades are put in to represent those regions where the background galaxies in
the picture have the most distorted shapes. That tells you where the foreground cluster
has the most dark matter. It’s a clever way of mapping in this one
system where the most dark matter is by mapping out its effect on the light it
comes through that region, even though we can see the matter itself.

So, there’s a lot of study on
dark matter even though we don’t know what it is. But it seems to act like normal matter in
many ways; we just need to understand what it is.

[image 38:30] There’s
something even stranger going on. The last decade, we have
realized that our universe, the expanding universe, is not only expanding
but it is accelerating.

The big question when I was in
graduate school was whether gravity would pull the expansion back together
again into a big crunch, or whether that expansion would accelerate, decelerate
(sorry) forever but slowing down. Because
gravity was the only thing we knew that work on such a large scale, and that
would only work to slow the expansion down.

Now, we found, by looking at
very distant galaxies carefully and comparing them to the expansion rates of nearer
galaxies, that the universe expansion for much of its history has been
accelerating. And we don’t know what causes the acceleration
on such a large scale.

4 comments:

"holly shit" - Only if people eat what is considered clean food can "holy shit" be possible. So I bet you didn't know that? But be careful with your profane mind. I thought only "holy cow" was sacred to the Hindus belief.

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